Greek original · 146 verses · some words can be tapped for a gloss · long chapter, split into parts; this part covers 1:1350–1:1495 (3259 verses in all)
ℹ️ This corpus has no verse-level morphological tagging. Lemmas come mainly from word-level tagging of other books in the same language (not from this verse), falling back to dictionary form-matching for the rest. Rare homographs can still be misread; verify against the original and a specialist lexicon where precision matters.
ℹ️ The Chinese and English alongside are this site's own translation, made directly from the original text on this page (not the CUV or the WEB, which follow the Masoretic Text and a different textual tradition).
"But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to him." And yet, when someone speaks to God — or rather, every holy person says:
"I am yours; save me, for I have sought out your righteous decrees." A: "Is it possible, then, that those who are understood to be the Father's own should likewise also be Christ's own in the same manner, unless the substance of both were brought together into unity?" B: "I say not."
Therefore the divine Paul, blending the two together as it were into an inseparable communion, at one time says the gospel is God the Father's, and at another that it is Christ's.
"Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God." And, transferring, as it were, the glory of God onto the Son who is conceived as from him, in him, and with him, he said again:
"But we have not used this right, lest we should put any hindrance in the way of the gospel of Christ." And binding tightly the meaning of both names into one, because of the identity of substance:
"But I have written to you more boldly in part, as reminding you, because of the grace given me by God, that I should be a minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, ministering as a priest the gospel of God, so that the offering of the Gentiles might be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit." One, then, is the gospel of Christ and of God; and whatever discourse would be made concerning God would already be fitting also for the Son.
But if something intervening and dividing were apparent, separating the one begotten into unlikeness from the one who begot him, then the account concerning both would no longer be the same.
A: "How, then, could the gospel of both be one, and how could it come down to us through the very same narratives without variation, unless the Son were God by nature — and would it not rather deceive the one being initiated, instead of drawing him by its net to the knowledge of the truth?" B: "True."
A: "It is absurd also in another way to suppose that the Son is not God by nature, while the sacred Scriptures loudly proclaim the Church to be God's, and yet again also Christ's."
"Give no offense, either to Jews or to Greeks, or to the Church of God." And again he affirmed that the Son would present the Church to himself, spotless and without wrinkle.
And indeed, when God, speaking through one of the prophets, said that he would dwell and walk about among us, it is Christ who dwells within us, and he, as God, brings to pass what was long ago divinely spoken.
"but Christ as a son over his house, whose house we are." B: "There is, then, nothing at all to prevent our truly thinking and holding that, since the Son has sprung forth for us from the very substance of God the Father, he should not be understood to exist as other than him, so far as natural identity is concerned."
"For if God is for us," he says, "who is against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but delivered him up for us all — how shall he not also, together with him, freely give us all things?"
A: "If, then, the Son is truly the own Son of God the Father, could he ever depart into a natural strangeness? Could any account be devised, not liable to blame, that would separate into estrangement and declare alien that which is properly someone's own — precisely that which is understood and called his own?" B: "I think not."
"You are gods, and all of you sons of the Most High." A: "Would anyone, then, picking out perhaps one or two from so vast a multitude, dare to say that they are the own sons of God the Father, and would he not incur the penalty which might be imposed upon those who wish to falsify the beauty of truth?" B: "I would say so indeed;"
A: "But if I should wish to learn again why, though countless ones are called gods and sons, the term 'own' properly and truly applies to only one, what would you yourself say?" B: "I would say that, on the one hand, they have been adopted into sonship, gaining this title as a discovery and gift of generosity from above;"
but he is not so, but is truly the own Son of God the Father, inasmuch as he has, together with him, marked off for himself the nature that is beyond all things.
A: "Is then that which is naturally God's own, therefore, not God, but rather something created — or how do you say?" B: "This point, indeed, admits of no dispute at all."
A: "But if someone should think that the created, or creation, is by nature the own of God, I think it would be safe [for us] to travel the reverse path in argument."
Since, then, the absurdity of such reasonings compels us to think rightly, the Son would accordingly be the own Son of God the Father — not numbered among those adopted, but as God from God.
And since whatever things are bound together into one and the same genus and species without variance have not been allotted a differing account of 'how they exist' that separates them into natural strangeness from one another;
for he has been named the own [Son] of God who is by nature and truly God, differing from the adopted multitude, and rising up into the glory of the one who is truly and singularly God.
B: "How do you mean?" A: "Do you think, then, that the argument on this point ought to be thoroughly tested by us? Tell me, to one who asks, what is the steep and confounding difficulty that drives him into perplexity."
"For if, they say, the man is the head of the woman because of his being of the same nature and identical in substance with her — even though he might be considered to hold the better portion (for the head is a precious thing, and in glory superior, within the body) — and Christ has been named the head of man, evidently because a natural relation calls him into close kinship with the creatures, just as, of course, is the case between man and woman — how then could he still be called God and true God, or how could he possess natural identity with God the Father, being reckoned among the things that came into being, even if he be considered to hold the rank of head? For, they say, the Son will merely surpass the measure of creation, as in a superiority of glory."
But concerning this we shall discourse at another time, allotting to our reflections the fitting occasion, and once again applying, at leisure, both mind and tongue to the task.
But since God is set as the head of Christ, what objection could anyone raise against them, O noble sirs, or what would prevent one from concluding that, if the Son is of the same kind as the creatures — since he is said to be the head of man — one might already be so bold as to drag the Father himself down among the things that are made? For he is set as head to the Son, even though the Son is, according to you, created and made.
Come then, let us thrust these notions aside and cast them off to the mountain, or fling them into the waves, and let us reckon instead something more fitting.
For we say that the man is the head of the woman, since she came forth from him in the beginning and was formed after the image of the man, who has God as his archetype — for thus it is written, according to the Scriptures.
And we define Christ to be the head of man, as a second root of the race and the firstfruits of humanity springing up into incorruption through sanctification in the Spirit.
As for the Father being the head of Christ, we shall hold and believe this insofar as Christ is consubstantial with him and naturally joined to him, in that he is understood to be, and is, God — even though he has appeared in the flesh and become like us.
Christ is, as it were, a boundary between divinity and humanity, holding the union of both as in one, and the convergence into unity, through an economic union, of things distinct by nature — a union untrodden and inaccessible to the mind, and not to be grasped by tongue or words.
For Christ is at once God and man, having as fountain and, as it were, root of his own hypostasis the Father who is in heaven — co-unoriginate and co-eternal with him, and not prior in time, since it is necessary that whatever is called 'head' should coexist with that of which it is the head — while according to the flesh he is also bound by a natural relation to us.
Since, then, God is truly understood and truly is the head of Christ, not in a false sense, how could he not be true God who has as his root true divinity, and is essentially attached to the one who begot him? For it is necessary that the head be understood as of the same nature as the rest of the body.
But if they suppose it necessary that the Word, who has come forth from God the Father, should slip outside the bounds of divinity and be reduced to the measure of things made, let them hear plainly:
{A.} For it is truly a clear proof of the utmost stupidity and extreme folly to stand in awe of the plant as being most excellent and noble, while assigning to it, as it were, fruit of a wholly different nature.
{A.} For how could he not be God — and truly so — he in whom, and in whom alone, one may know the Father to be God by nature and in truth? For Paul writes thus to those who have believed:
'But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumph in Christ and manifests through us the fragrance of the knowledge of him in every place, because we are the sweet fragrance of Christ to God.' Since, then, the fragrance of God and the Father has appeared in Christ and is known in him, how then must we suppose this comes to pass? For the produce of the seasons grows in meadows and gardens; let these, for our purpose, be the apple and the lily.
Now then, my friend, would the fragrance of the lily naturally settle upon the apple, or would the apple in turn lend its own scent to the lily, so that in both there would be, wholly interchanged, what properly belongs to each? {B.} By no means — each will surely give forth its own.
But how could the fragrance of divinity according to nature arise through a creature, a nature of a different kind, rather than in the way God himself is? For just as no sensible person would suppose the sweet fragrance of divinity to reside in the nature of creatures — for that would be utterly foolish — so no one of sound mind would attach to the unbegotten divinity, which is above all things, a Son of base and alien nature as the emanation proceeding from it, ranked as its fragrance.
For the Only-Begotten has come forth ineffably from the essence of God the Father, breathing forth for us in himself the whole fragrance of the nature of the One who begot him.
{A.} It would also, by another approach, be not unapparent that the Son is truly God and has come forth from God, if we should likewise examine the argument concerning him in this way.
{B.} In what way do you mean? {A.} Tell me, would it be fitting for someone among existing beings to have the power to bestow whatever only the divine nature alone can grant? {B.} By all means.
{A.} Then would it not be, quite reasonably, that whoever is seen to possess the power to accomplish these things stands among the highest heights, allotted a share of God-befitting glory? {B.} How could it be otherwise? {A.} Peace, then, is a good thing given by God, a gift of heaven, coming to us solely from divine bestowals.
'O Lord, besides you we know no other; we call upon your name' — since, I suppose, in obtaining peace, those who have spoken thus at all have a share in the enjoyment of every good.
{A.} Peace, then, is truly the fruit and gift of the operation from on high, as I just said — belonging to none of the things that are made, but to God alone according to nature.
{A.} Observe, then, that the Word who has shone forth from him is at once the provider and dispenser of whatever things God the Father would grant to us.
'...would he be diminished in glory, and would he not rather stand, in every respect, equal and alike to the One who begot him?' {B.} 'That is correct.'
{B.} What do you mean? {A.} Do you not agree it is true that to concur with the opinions of the saints will make the truth well-trodden for us, and will lead us up to what is pleasing to God and what is proclaimed by the Holy Spirit concerning the Son? {B.} And what is that? {A.} That the Son is God by nature and in truth.
'The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ knows — he who is blessed forever — that I am not lying.' Then he immediately weaves an equal crown of such honor and glory for the Son as well, fearing nothing, since he knew him to be God by nature and in truth:
'For I myself could wish to be accursed, cut off from Christ, for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, whose are the fathers, and from whom is the Christ according to the flesh, who is God over all, blessed forever.'
'Amen.' Shall we, then, place him who is God over all beneath God, together with all creatures, as though he were not truly God and were to be ranked among those who are so by grace only — even though he has obtained the rank of being over all, this great and God-befitting dignity, I mean, of being blessed — and that continually and unceasingly sealed by the 'Amen'?
Rather, he would have the sounder mind who confesses the Son to be true God and to have truly come forth from God — he through whom and with whom, be glory to God the Father, together with the Holy Spirit, unto the ages of ages.
{A.} Is there any way that one who sets God, who has come forth from God by ineffable begetting, in the glory of a true Son by nature, and yet calls him a creature and a thing made, would not incur the penalty which, we say, hangs over those who are wont to mock the glory of God — since the divinely inspired Scripture thus decrees:
'whether he be a stranger or a native, when he blasphemes the name of the Lord, let him die.' {B.} I do not think he could possibly escape being caught, wholly and in every way, by the penalties fitting for him.
{A.} It is best, then, O Hermias, not to let oneself be swept along by the reckless speech of others, since it carries us off toward a disapproved mind, but rather to take the words of those who speak of God as the straight and unbending rule of faith.
{A.} Therefore, they have determined to worship the Only-begotten Word of God as by no means a created being, that is, one that has undergone a passage into being brought into existence; rather, they declare him to be the fruit of the essence of the One who begot him, concurrent and coeternal with him, and they call him Son, and true God, and eternal life.
'And we know,' he says, 'that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, that we may know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ.'
For nothing, I suppose, prevents or hinders it — since true divinity has, in the Son, once and for all suffered inclusion among things created, and eternal life has somehow been pried loose from being life eternal, and, mixed in together with the other creatures, has, as though by necessity, accepted an existence measured out by time.
for it is permitted to those who wish it to depart from it with ease, and to thrust away the destructive and corrupting doctrine of our opponents, by piously granting that the victory must belong to the voices of the saints.
For those who have been appointed the light of the world — by him who was not ignorant of his own nature, I mean Christ — have declared by divine utterance that God is by no means the Maker of the Only-begotten, but rather his Father, in the sense of begetting.
'You are the light of the world.' And indeed, declaring them to be unerring and true mystagogues, he said, 'Go, make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.' Now where there is truly a Father, and a begetting, and indeed also a Son — one who possesses the glory of sonship not by adoption, but essentially and from the Father — what place could the slander of 'having been made' possibly hold? {B.} None at all, as I think.
{A.} Let none at all among those who care for orthodoxy fall into such perverse reasoning as to think that we must place the act of begetting — that is, the matter of generation — as far as possible from the essence of God the Father, blushing in their ignorance lest the divine essence should somehow suffer some unwanted thing in itself, and, subjected to the necessities that govern bodies, grow weary.
For some among the senseless attribute to it amputations and the much-discussed 'effluence,' and thereby have unwittingly plunged themselves into pits of destruction — supposing that the ineffable nature of God, which transcends all understanding, if it appears to beget, must also perhaps suffer something of such things, being wholly ignorant of what the incorporeal is by nature, and, again, what a body is and what belongs to bodies.
For the incorporeal is wholly incapable of division — that is, of effluence and amputation; rather, it would be fitting for a tangible and gross nature to be subject to any such things.
If, then, the word 'he has begotten' is used of God, let every suspicion of passion be cast aside, and let the reasoning prevail that attributes to the nature of God the things more fitting to him.
For, by feigning a fear that the Father's nature might somehow suffer something in the act of begetting, they deprive it of its most glorious prerogatives.
For that the Father and God must, in every respect whatsoever, be confessed as the Begetter rather than the Maker of the Only-begotten — this, I think, sound reasoning will persuade us.
For one would state the matter more clearly in this way, and would rightly award to it the palm of surpassing excellence, if indeed even among us, incomparably, that which is begotten from a person invariably rises above and stands superior to everything that same person makes.
If then God will be only a Maker, and will possess the glory that comes from being able to create, but will no longer be a Begetter, I shudder to utter something so ill-omened and jarring; yet I will say it nonetheless, and quite unwillingly at that — that the nature of God has truly fallen short of what is best and most excellent of all, while creation is somehow the wider in glory, since to it belongs not only the power to fashion and to create things by various arts, but also, accompanying this, the power to beget — which is manifestly the more brilliant of the two.
{A.} Son, then, Hermias, and not a made thing — that is what has appeared from God according to nature, a begotten offspring truly in essence, not the discovery of wisdom nor the fruit of art; for that, we say, is precisely what the whole of creation is.
'but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.' And with the highest of prizes he crowns the one who has thus believed.
'Who is the one who overcomes the world, if not the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?' And besides this, my friend, the Son himself has shown forth, not in small measure, the love of God the Father toward us.
'For God so loved,' it says, 'the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.' Yet why, then, did he make it, in a sense, the capstone and final addition to his own writings, that one must believe the incarnate Word to be truly the Son of God, if indeed he is not the Son? And how shall the one who has not grasped the truth as it is — namely, that he is a made thing and a generated being — overcome the whole world, having thereby gained a prize worthy of such rightly-known truths, the victory over the world? For if it is not too hazardous to say that God honors and welcomes people of perverse mind, and crowns some among beings with divine gifts, then I myself would say, and quite reasonably too, that every word of praise and every honor is owed to those who have supposed the Only-begotten to be, foolishly, not Son at all but a creature and a generated thing — even though he is said to have been begotten, and to have been named Son by the Father himself and by all that is holy.
'What is the rumor about him that has spread through the land of the Jews, or through the cities bordering Judea?' — setting aside the childish and unbecoming opinions of the crowd, he cried out most wisely and with full understanding, saying:
'And I also say to you, that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it' — by 'rock,' I think, he means, under another name, nothing other than the disciple's unshaken and most firmly-grounded faith, upon which the Church of Christ has been fixed and established without ever falling, and remains forever unconquered, even by the very gates of Hades themselves.
Peter's faith, as faith in the Son, was not carelessly improvised, nor did it spring from merely human thoughts, but from the ineffable initiation that comes from above, God the Father clearly revealing his own Son, and instilling the full assurance of this in the souls of his true [children].
For Christ would by no means have lied when he said, 'Flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.' If, then, Peter is blessed and is deemed worthy of such surpassing honors for having confessed him to be the Son of the living God, how are they not thrice-wretched and utterly cast away — most readily heaping insult upon what is well-pleasing and right in the eyes of God the Father — who drag down the fruit of his own essence into a made thing, and who, most senselessly, reckon the co-eternal offshoot of life among things whose life is borrowed from outside? Or are such men not exceedingly ignorant? {Β.} Utterly so.
{A.} Since, moreover, holding so debased and mean an opinion concerning the Son, they overturn that great and astonishing wonder of the love of God the Father, and they shall be caught sharpening their unbridled mouths even against the very dignities of the Godhead itself.
{A.} It would surely seem better to anyone that what is begotten surpasses whatever one might fashion by art, if indeed the one is the fruit that comes from us and from the very substance of the one who begot it, while the other is the discovery of the best counsel and the work of wisdom, not a shoot of substance.
{B.} What of it, then? {A.} Do you not perceive that one would admire, perhaps, somewhat less the love of God the Father who gave up for the ransom of all creation one who was merely a part of creation, if the Son is indeed a generated being; whereas one would marvel far more richly, and quite reasonably, at the exchange given for the life of the world, upon learning that he gave up his own Son, and did not spare his own offspring — inasmuch as he became flesh and appeared to die — but rather thirsted the more for the enduring well-being of the world? {B.} I understand.
{A.} I think, for my part — and let no one take offense at a word kindled to boldness out of love for God — that Christ would not even be a sufficient price for the whole of creation, nor would he be able adequately to purchase the life of the world, even were he to lay down his own soul as it were in payment, and to pour out for us his precious blood, if he is not truly Son, and God from God, but rather a creature and a part of creation.
{A.} I would add that, on such a reckoning, creation would then have been saved without receiving anything at all from God, having had no need whatsoever of the cooperation that comes from above.